“Shooting gives me a good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“A big lie is more plausible than truth.”
“We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”
“No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”
“If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.”
“The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.”
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”
“There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.”
“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”
“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
“I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”
“Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”
“The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”
“He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”
“Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?”
“Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”
“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.”
“He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”
“There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.”
“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”
“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”
“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”
“There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”
“I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.”
“Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.”
“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
“We wait always for something that does not come.”
“A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”
“No one ever stopped when they were winning.”
“Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.”
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
“Before you quit, you have to try.”
“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”
“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”
“Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”
“It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”
“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.”
“Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
“All bad writers are in love with the epic.”
“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
“I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”
“It’s a town you come to for a short time.”
“They arrested us after breakfast.”
“I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”
“Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.”
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
“To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.”
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